Star City schools lead state in hands-on STEM

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BENJAMIN KRAIN --12/11/2014--
Andy Spagoni, left, Daniel Mejia, right and other 4th-grade students at Star City Elementary School learn about the brain during a Project Lead the Way science lab module at Star City Elementary School. The hands-on, activity-based instructional program is used in about 80 districts in Arkansas but Star City was one of the first to adopt it and is further along than most.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/BENJAMIN KRAIN --12/11/2014-- Andy Spagoni, left, Daniel Mejia, right and other 4th-grade students at Star City Elementary School learn about the brain during a Project Lead the Way science lab module at Star City Elementary School. The hands-on, activity-based instructional program is used in about 80 districts in Arkansas but Star City was one of the first to adopt it and is further along than most.

STAR CITY -- The public school district in this south Arkansas center known for logging, farming and manufacturing is building a state and national reputation for its activity-based teaching of STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Building circuit boards for night lights, coding computer chase games, experimenting with flight, measuring stress on a structure, constructing robots for competition and detecting possible disease in the human body are among the activities built into the day for many Star City students.

At the center of Star City's hands-on, problem-solving instructional program is curriculum and staff training provided by Project Lead The Way, a national nonprofit organization with its headquarters in Indianapolis.

Star City has been at the forefront of using Project Lead The Way in Arkansas since it and a small group of other Arkansas districts received science- and technology-education grants through Gov. Mike Beebe's STEM Works initiative in early 2012.

The grants of up to $95,000 each for Project Lead The Way programs also went that year to the Gravette, Jonesboro, Prairie Grove, and Riverview school districts and to the Northark Technical Center that serves 14 districts. Now, 82 Arkansas schools -- including campuses in the Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special districts -- and more than 6,500 schools in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., have purchased and are using the organization's curriculum and staff training this school year.

But Star City was the first in Arkansas to offer the program at kindergarten through 12th grade last year, Star City Superintendent Richard Montgomery said. That was the result of the district being part of a national pilot of the organization's new STEM units for elementary schools. Project Lead The Way's new Launch program for elementary schools is ongoing in Star City and it has started elsewhere in the state and nation.

"We're proud of what is going on," said Montgomery, who became familiar with Project Lead The Way about a dozen years ago when he worked in upstate New York where the high school engineering component of the program originated.

In the past couple of years, the 1,650-student Star City district has hosted a stream of visitors interested in the program, including teachers and administrators from other school districts as well as Tom Kimbrell, who was Arkansas education commissioner at the time, and Vince Bertram, the president of Project Lead The Way, who toured the Star City schools in October to see the Project Lead The Way courses in operation.

Montgomery is happy to have the visitors.

"We want to share the knowledge," he said. "We don't want to remain the first and only Arkansas school. We would like for as many schools as will to look into this and adopt these learning opportunities."

He said good instruction in the science, technology, engineering and math subjects is necessary because jobs in those fields are hard to fill because of a lack of skilled employees.

"We're going to try to fix that," Montgomery said.

Star City High School offers Project Lead The Way programs in engineering, biomedical science and computer science within its eight-period, 45-minutes-per-period class day. Each of the three programs includes courses for each year of high school. For example, the engineering courses include introduction to engineering design, principles of engineering, and civil engineering/architecture. Next year a capstone course in engineering will be offered for seniors.

Garrett Crowder, a ninth-grader in Ginny Chambliss' Introduction to Engineering Design class, was recently making a multiview drawing on his computer of the different parts to a Rubik's Cube-type puzzle that he had previously built.

"We had constraints. We couldn't just make whatever," Garrett said, taking the actual cube off the counter next to his computer and demonstrating how it comes apart and can be reassembled.

Garrett said he took Project Lead The Way courses in middle school but he was the only one in his group of friends to take the high school engineering course.

"They all said it would be too hard," he said. "I like challenges."

Chambliss said her students would eventually use the computer-aided design, or CAD, software used by professional engineers to produce an animated version of their puzzle pieces coming together as a completed puzzle. It is just one of the projects the students will do this year as they learn the design process.

"Once they get out of this course, they will know what collaboration is and they know what problem solving is," Chambliss said. "They don't just 'know it,' they use it."

In Chambliss' civil engineering/architecture class of juniors and seniors, the students are designing affordable houses, following the guidelines set by the Habitat for Humanity organization. At the end of the lengthy project, the students will have a set of prints ready for anyone to take and build, she said.

Chambliss interviewed with the Star City district specifically for the teaching job in the engineering program.

"This is everything I believe in," she said. "I taught chemistry and physics for 16 years. I always wanted to draw kids into the sciences. The way to do that is by making it real."

Lindy Vagts, a cardiac nurse and a former biology teacher, is the Star City district's biomedical sciences teacher, teaching two classes each of principles of biomedical sciences, human body systems and medical interventions.

In the first-year course, students work to identify the cause of death of a patient, investigating symptoms, researching disease and doing lab experiments, Vagts said. The second year, the students study the body systems and what happens if the systems fail. They use model clay to create organs for classroom mannequins. And in the third-year course the students study infectious diseases, genetics and medicine.

"This is totally different than a regular classroom," Vagts said about the medical interventions course where each of her students was doing research on laptop computers. "There's no real lecturing. You take what they are gathering from their research and pull it together to mimic a real work situation. Most of what they are learning they wouldn't get until they get to med school or nursing school."

The district offers six of eight Gateway to Technology courses designed by Project Lead The Way for middle school grades, Montgomery said. Those partial-year courses are Flight and Space, Design and Modeling, Automation and Robotics, Magic of Electrons, Science of Technology and Medical Detectives.

Pupils take on projects such as constructing pull toys made of gears and wheels. They study flight by building homemade hovercrafts and tissue-paper balloons. They solder photovoltaic cells onto tiny circuit boards to make night lights, and build robots for competition.

At Jimmy Brown Elementary School, pupils are learning STEM concepts previously saved for older students. Kindergartners in Stacy Atwood's class recently spooned popcorn kernels through a funnel and into a tube to simulate how the stomach works. They blew through a straw into plastic bags to mimic lungs and listened to their hearts beat through a stethoscope.

Montgomery, the superintendent, said 100 percent of Star City's pupils through the sixth grade are participating in the Project Lead The Way units this year, as are 53 percent of the middle school pupils and 40 percent of the high school students.

It's a program that engages students and helps minimize student misbehavior, said Montgomery, who led efforts to restructure about $800,0000 of his district's $15 million annual budget to accommodate the STEM program costs, including hiring and training staff and equipping the programs.

Jennifer Cahill, spokesman for the national Project Lead The Way organization, said the organization charges a flat fee of $750 for elementary and middle school programs and up to $3,000 for high school programs. But the average start-up cost for a high school program is between $35,000 to $40,000 over three years for the fee, staff training and equipment purchases, Cahill said.

Kimbrell, who was Arkansas' education commissioner when Beebe announced the STEM Works initiative, is now superintendent of the Bryant School District, which has a thriving Project Lead The Way program in the middle and high school grades. The district is expanding it into the elementary level.

"I can't think of any negatives about it," Kimbrell said. "It's pretty phenomenal what our kids are doing with this project-based approach to learning the state standards. It has brought real-life experience learning into our schools."

One of the strengths of the Project Lead The Way is the training provided for teachers on projects based on the state's education standards, Kimbrell said.

"It's just good professional learning," he said.

Rosie Coleman, North Little Rock School District director of elementary education, went through the training herself as part of incorporating the Project Lead The Way's Launch program into each of that district's elementary schools in 2015-16.

"It was probably one of the best trainings that I've ever gone to," said Coleman about the session taught over a weekend at one of the district's schools.

"We had to create things," she recalled. "For the kindergarten unit, we had to build a beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk. The difficult thing was getting the beanstalk to stand up. The teachers became the students and we really got to think about how kids learn and how we teach."

North Little Rock was attracted to Project Lead The Way because it is "so hands-on" while integrating all the core academic areas, including literacy and social studies, as well as math and science.

"It's just exciting to be able to offer the students in North Little Rock an alternative way of learning, but it will also allow kids to have real world experience, to create things. It's so real life," Coleman said.

"We are absolutely going to jump into this and we are absolutely going to make it work for our kids."

A Section on 12/27/2014

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